The Scattered and the Dead (Book 0.5)

by McBain, Tim

  And I thought about how much I’d dreaded this. Even before everyone died and the world became harsh and violent right out in the open, I’d dreaded confrontation. I’d worried about it. I feared that when it finally came along, I’d freeze, I’d flinch, I’d be too scared to move.

  But it was here, and I knew no fear. I felt the power in my arms, felt the gun in my hands, and I had control. I found myself stimulated by this, found pleasure in the aggression welling up inside, that sadistic glee that makes you smile right before you jump out and scare someone.

  I raised the carbine, lined up the site with the back of the flat-topped head, aiming directly for that knobby spot where the brain pan ends and the skull slopes into the neck. I took a breath. Blinked a few times. I could feel every individual drop of sweat on my skin just then, all of them oozing at different speeds, meandering downward on different angles.

  My finger squeezed, and the gun popped out a percussive sound, the stock digging into my shoulder, and the brains blasted out of the front of the shattered head. I wheeled to the right, lined up the second flat-topped skull, rinsed and repeated just as the soldier turned toward me, and his head, too, came apart, this time the bullet entering near his temple and the gloop flying out of the back.

  A feeling came over me then like someone poured a shrieking kettle of water in with my brain. The warmth roiled all through me like when you wake up sick and confused, and my hands and arms shook from the adrenalin, stimulation to the point that my thoughts smeared together. My jaw clenched as tight as it could, flexing in rapid fire bursts.

  The only word I can think of to describe this moment is fun. Really fun. Like riding the biggest, fastest, most satisfying roller coaster and orgasming the whole time. It was the strangest, sickest feeling, but I couldn’t wipe the smile off of my face, couldn’t stop the tingle that filled my chest with every breath.

  I don’t remember the bodies falling, don’t remember the knees buckling and the dead weight slumping to the ground. I just remember the two of them in a final state of recline a few feet apart from each other, their heads torn to pieces, one faceless, one not. And I looked upon them for a long while, and these words came to me from nowhere:

  “And all the king’s horses, and all the king’s men, couldn’t put their brains back together again.”

  The toppled figure that lay before the army men showed no real reaction to either my gunshots or the gory scene in front of him. I’d almost forgotten him. Almost felt alone for a second there.

  He crawled toward the corpses, his movements slow and strangely inarticulate. And I knew right away he wasn’t normal, wasn’t quite human.

  I watched his arms drag him across the grass, watched him mount the faceless corpse, watched his eyes remain blank while he went to chewing the loose flaps of flesh around the edge of the exit wound, rivulets of blood squishing out of the corners of his mouth. I sat and stared as he went at it for a while, gnawing and chawing and slurping, before I put a bullet in his head, too.

  53 days after

  I think I hallucinated some people today. So that was new.

  I rode my bike South checking out some of the stores out that way. First of all, I should mention that it smells like piss over there. Like everywhere. Just a real pissy smell hanging in the air. Human urine. Not the best.

  So I had my t-shirt up over my mouth and nose, and I checked out some of the shops in one of the plazas over there. The hardware and sporting goods stores had been cleared of anything useful. I thought about taking a volleyball to talk to, but I figured screw it.

  It gets weird to feel so alone as you do this stuff, so I think I was singing as I walked into this Chuck E. Cheese. I guess I sing when I’m out there now. I didn’t really realize this until I heard a noise and then I saw these girls in the back of the restaurant. I got kind of embarrassed. They were young. Like a teenager and a little girl. I made eye contact with the older one as she slipped through a door. It really caught me off guard, so I froze for a second and then I worked my way over there. The door was locked, and by the time I found the key and got in there?

  Nothing. No one there. Of course.

  I bet I will sing less when I start hearing voices, so I’m looking forward to that.

  57 days after

  So I think I’m all done. Writing, that is. How long could this really go on, anyway? It was never going to work between us. I see that now. Truth is, and I’m not trying to be mean here, you just aren’t my type. I ain’t into dead chicks.

  And I’m leaving here, anyway. I’ve been out riding, scouting, all day the past few days, and I’ve found places with functioning hand pumps on the wells out in the damn boonies. A house up on a hill that I can easily defend. I almost can’t believe it’s unoccupied, though I suppose it won’t be for long.

  Now when I sleep, I dream of those two corpses, one faceless and the other not. I see their heads come apart over and over. But it doesn’t bother me. It doesn’t upset me. It’s not like the chocolate snot. It’s destruction without meaning. Just a thing I saw. A thing I did. A thing I will do again. A thing I want.

  A thing I became.

  That’s the truth right there.

  The beast is come.

  I am the end.

  And you should know that when I look in the mirror, I like this thing I am. Whatever it is, whatever it means, I like it. I feel like a beaten up match that finally got scraped against the sidewalk hard enough to ignite, and now I’m going to burn brighter and hotter than all you motherfuckers combined, dead or alive as you may be. I will burn anyone who gets close.

  So I will try to squeeze this behemoth of a letter into an envelope or two and slide it under your door, and then I will be gone. It may be pointless, I realize, may be an empty gesture to deliver this piece of writing. Ours may be a relationship that only ever existed in my head. But maybe they’re all pointless. Maybe they all just exist in people’s heads.

  I don’t know.

  I started this letter in a lonely state, surrounded by people, literally in a building crawling with them, a city full of them, but unsure how to connect with them, how to really know any of them. And I end this letter in a lonely state, a different kind of lonely with no one around for miles. Apart from the dead bodies, I guess.

  But it’s okay. Sometimes I think the kind of connection I was looking for was never real anyway, wasn’t possible. It was just a fantasy, a childish way of looking at the world, of looking at people. I saw individual humans, personalities distinct from each other like snowflakes, and I imagined some way for two of them to intertwine, for each self to worm its way out of its skull and become one with another. But maybe a kiss isn’t more than it seems on the most literal level, the most animal level, just like what I saw in those soap operas. Maybe it’s just two apes pressing their mouth holes together after all, serving those impulses no different from all of the other apes, little different from all of the other beasts.

  Maybe that’s all we are. For real.

  What does any of it matter now, right? I will go through the motions one last time. I will slide this note under that door, and I will stand in the hallway for a beat, and then I will move on, free from all I’ve ever been, all I’ve ever desired, all I’ve ever believed. I will walk out among the other apes and know the beast I am. I will walk into a future full of murder and blood and fun.

  (Never) See you on the other side (of the door),

  -Decker

  This Is Just The Beginning

  Keep reading for a preview of the next 700 page installment of The Scattered and the Dead series.

  Rex

  Panama City, Florida

  68 days before

  Rex ripped the IV needle out of his wrist, machines tattling on him with shrill whoops and cries. He didn’t give a shit. He wasn’t going to die in some hospital room by himself. Hermetically sealed in a plastic shrouded death box even though there were thousands of “ebola-like” cases in Florida alone, the number growing b
y the minute? No thanks.

  He rose from the bed, his legs wobbling beneath him for a second. His vision swam along the edges, so he put a palm on the mattress to steady himself. He closed his eyes, took a few deep breaths. It seemed to get better.

  Still, wobbling legs and dodgy vision comprised the least of his problems. His head felt like a swollen watermelon about to burst. It hurt like nothing else he’d felt in his life.

  He was 43. He knew pain. This was un-fuckin-real.

  Throw in the periodic projectile vomiting of thick, red blood, and you’ve got the makings of a serious problem. It was almost comical to have a doctor weigh in on this. Pretty straightforward diagnosis, he thought: You’re fucked.

  He knew he didn’t have long, had known so for a while. In some ways, his fever rising to the point that his consciousness faded out into madness had been a mercy, had protected him from the worst of the suffering as he disconnected from reality.

  But for the moment, at least, the fever had died down some, and his thoughts were clear. He had a last meal in mind, a final resting place. It’d involve hard work, but his life had been full of that. It might as well end on a familiar note.

  He prodded at the plastic sheeting cordoning off his bed from the rest of room, fingers searching for a flap or a slit or some opening to get to his things in the wardrobe. This wasn’t a normal isolation room. Those were long full by the time he was admitted. Hospital workers employed plastic sheets here to convert this normal room into a quarantined one. He figured this was for the better anyhow as it increased the odds that his keys were still around. If he could find a way to get to the other side of this damn plastic anyway.

  The only opening went toward the door of the room, the opposite direction of where he needed to go, but he guessed it would work well enough. He turned himself sideways, trying to make his barrel chest as svelte as he could. He sidled between the plastic and the wall, found the wardrobe, opened it. His hand fished around in the dark. There. His shorts, and in his pocket, the keys.

  After a moment’s hesitation, he slid the shorts on, but he didn’t bother with the t-shirt, leaving the hospital robe to adorn his upper body. Fashion matters little to the dying, but he didn’t like the idea of pressing his bare ass into the leather seat of his truck.

  Hot leather pressed up against his sweaty taint? Fuck that noise.

  He kept moving between the plastic and the wall, reaching the window and sliding it open. Here was the perk of being on the ground floor. He could pop out, cross a bed of flowers and some grass and be in the parking lot without passing a single nurse. The thought made him smile. If they knew, they would surely try to detain him under the guise of preventing the spread of the disease. What a joke that was. The world was already fucked. You weren’t going to unfuck it by keeping him in a room with plastic sheeting for wallpaper. It didn’t take Dr. Oz to diagnose that shit.

  He dangled his legs out the window, lost his balance a little on the edge and tumbled down into the reddish mulch surrounding the flowers, his hands and knees jamming down into the wood chips. His head felt like swollen tectonic plates were crashing into each other just under the surface, threatening to rupture the shell of cranium surrounding them.

  Everything went black and silent, and reality filtered down to only the pain. It just about knocked him out.

  Un-fuckin-real.

  Once the hurt passed, though, he chuckled. His hands retracted from the mulch, and he stood and brushed away the red bits clinging to his shins. The sunlight made him squint his eyes, but the heat and humidity wrapped themselves around him like a toasty blanket. He’d lived in Florida his whole life. This sticky, hot-as-balls air felt like coming home after all of that time in the air-conditioned plastic nightmare.

  He staggered over the grass and into the parking area, his legs tottering under him, shaky and weak. No damn clue where his truck was, but he didn’t mind looking around a bit. Being upright and ambulatory felt good as hell. The blacktop scorched his feet, but it didn’t bother him. He’d walked over the hot sand on the beach since he was little.

  After wandering up and down the rows, he spotted the truck and closed on it. If walking around felt good, opening the door and sitting down felt better. He was winded already, his head had that swelly feeling, and the world was just faintly blurry along the edges. Still, he made it.

  Inside, the truck was stifling. This was beyond a toasty blanket. He liked the heat, but the sun beat down on the windshield all day. This was dog-killing hot. He started it up and put the air conditioner on.

  And suddenly the victory of his escape seemed much smaller. His life would still end the same way: He would die alone, unable to visit his family for fear of infecting them, unable to walk more than a couple hundred feet without getting the brain bloat headaches or whatever the shit that was all about.

  It wasn’t supposed to go down like this. He’d planned for this, had a fallout shelter stocked to the brim with food and water and weapons. He had two bug-out vehicles. He had caches of supplies in strategic locations. He was a prepper, an intelligent and thorough one.

  Unfortunately, the disease cared not. It killed without prejudice, whether you feared and respected it or doubted and ignored it.

  He was supposed to make doomsday his bitch, and instead he was going to be among the first to go.

  He reached into the glove box and pulled out a can of Skoal. It felt empty, but he was relieved to find a little left in there. He packed a wad into his lip, felt the nicotine tingle through the membrane and into his system. He leaned back and reveled in one of the few pleasures he could still enjoy. The final meal would come soon enough, but for now he would close his eyes and feel the tobacco in his lip and feel the stimulant enter his bloodstream and feel the temperature inside the truck return to something reasonable.

  His thoughts drifted to his family. Maybe he would triumph over doomsday yet. Not by himself but by his kin.

  His children were tough kids. His oldest, Ryan, got dared to go down a 25 foot ladder face first when he was 12. Rex came out of the house just in time to witness the disaster. Ryan fell, of course, banging his head on every rung on the way down. When the battered kid finally hit the bottom and stopped, he laughed. Everyone was frozen, mouths agape, certain that they’d just watched a 12 year old break his neck 6 or 7 separate times, and the kid fucking laughed about it.

  His younger boy, Dylan, was a hell of a football player, too. Not the fastest kid, but one of those head-hunting safeties that just about decapitated any receiver that dared to go over the middle. If he were a step and a half faster, he might even be SEC material, but the coaches told him to expect to start hearing from the smaller schools as soon as his junior highlight reel got around.

  His daughter, Mia, was the toughest of the lot. She was the bully of the family. Rex didn’t know if it was a middle child thing, but she had a temper to her and had beaten up both of her brothers more than once, along with what seemed like half the kids at school. Personality-wise, she was the one that took after him the most.

  These kids waded through some hard shit already. Their mother died of stomach cancer a few years ago, when they were still young. He was proud of the way they handled it. Not one of them bottled the pain up, they let it out, they lashed out, and in time they found ways to deal with it. They didn’t get over it. Rex didn’t think you got over shit like that, nor were you supposed to. But they found their own ways to deal.

  They’d be without their mom and dad now, but if they hunkered down and survived the first wave of this thing, those kids would be all right. He had no doubt of that. He wouldn’t be leaving them high and dry. They had a mountain of food and guns and ammo thanks to his diligence.

  Rex sat up and opened his eyes. He felt better. He plucked an empty Dew can from the cup holder and spit tobacco juice into it. Except what came out of his mouth was bright red and a little too thick. Almost gummy.

  Shit.

  He glanced into the rearview mirr
or to find red tears draining from his eyes. The scarlet rivers pouring down his face seemed to be gaining momentum.

  Shit.

  He looked away from his reflection. This was it. This was how it ended. He wouldn’t get to eat that final burger after all.

  He coughed and red spattered onto his fist. He felt the liquid churning in his gut, more of the same ready to come out the other end, he knew. As the flow increased to a gush, the blood filled his vision, turning it red then black.

  He leaned his head back onto the head rest again, closed his eyes and felt the wet warmth of life spilling out of him. The fear crept over him now, made his torso quiver, made his breathing ragged. He hadn’t been scared this way often in his life, but he was now. It reminded him of being a little boy, home alone in the dark.

  And yet, he would die in his truck, not surrounded by his family but thinking of them. He could think of worse ways to go.

  The Scattered and the Dead

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